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Emulab Installation Documentation

Installing the Emulab Operations Server

Installing Emulab software

Step 1 - Installing packages

To make sure that you're running with versions of software from the ports collection that are known to work with our software, and to save you hours of compile time, we provide pre-built binary packages of the ports required by Emulab.

If you haven't already, download the Emulab Server Package (you can use the FreeBSD 'fetch' command to download the file.)

Unpack this someplace (you need about 550MB of space, so don't use /tmp unless it is large enough). Let's say you unpacked it to /var/tmp. You would then run:

Of course, if you unpacked it somewhere else, put in the correct path.

We provide all of the binary packages necessary to build ops/fs/boss in our packages tarball. You may wish to install more packages built from source via the ports tree, but if not, there is no need to install a /usr/ports tree.

We have run into many, many problems with clashes between versions of the FreeBSD ports. So, rather than using the /usr/ports tree that comes on the FreeBSD installation media, we use one that we've tested against. If you haven't already, obtain a copy of our 'approved' ports collection. The package is about 66MB; it unpacks to 900MB. Unpack it to a place such as /usr/ports (if it exists, rename the old directory to ports.old, or just remove it), and install whichever ports you want to make ops feel like 'home' (such as emacs, jove, or whatever).

Step 2 - Unpacking and running 'configure'

At this point, you should already have made your definitions file. If not, refer to Creating the Definitions File. You will use this same file on boss, ops, and fs. You should also have the the Emulab source tree available.

Typically, you would store your defs file in the source tree along with the other defs files that came in the package.

Step 3 - Running the ops installation script

In the object tree you've configured (say, /usr/testbed/obj/testbed), there's an 'install' subdirectory with a script called 'emulab-install'. Just run this script as root (note the same package directory argument as above):

cd install
perl emulab-install -p /var/tmp/packages ops

This will take care of installing any additional ports, and doing various other configuration of FreeBSD required to make it into an ops node. The script is designed so that you can run it as many times as you want, and it will skip steps that it's already done. If it fails, send the output to Utah so that we can fix it up. If it succeeds, follow any other instructions it may have. The script will tell you to reboot the machine, but you may wait until after the next step to do so, if you want.

(You may have to set the executable bit on this script, since configure won't; we'd like to get this fixed at some point.)

You should be aware that, among other things, this script sets up sendmail, and sets up password-less 'sudo' for anyone in the 'wheel' group. If you don't want these for security reasons, you can undo them after the installation script has completed.

Step 4 - Installing Emulab software from source

To install the actual testbed software, simply run the following from your object directory (i.e. /usr/testbed/obj/testbed):

gmake ops-install

Note:

If you're logged in as root, /usr/local/bin, where gmake resides on FreeBSD, may not be in your path. If not, include the full path to gmake in the above command.

Step 6 - Setting up mailing lists

The emulab-install script set up some mailing lists for the email addresses you defined in the definitions file. These are located in /etc/mail/lists. If you want to run these mailing lists off your ops node, you can put some people in them now. These are just standard sendmail list files: a list of addresses and/or archive files, one per line. If you chose to use archive files, give a path to the file you'd like sendmail to stick all correspondence in, and create this file.